Three Summers Of The Vine

Sweltering heat that only a child can relish.

The height of Summer, the 3rd of July, Byhalia, Mississippi, 1983.

I’m young enough to have the smell of rain be a sweet surprise on a mid-summer’s day and old enough to remember it four decades since. Perhaps the thousand tiny impressions created by the rain has more to do with the song of the cicada that accompanies it. Or perhaps the simultaneously intermittent, yet continuous, aroma wafting from the kitchen of the five room shotgun shack, a stone’s throw east of Byhalia in unincorporated Dixie.

“The smell of that rain is just as green as Summer can be.” My Aunt Caroline intones to anyone listening, as I rest my head on her lap while she drags from her cigarette with one hand, and plays with my earlobe with the other. In a moment before the soporific song of katydids, the idle chatter of grown folks competes with the metronomic pitter patter of the spittle of the Mississippi shower, I am whole and as content as a boy of eight can be at dusk, having whiled his time fishing at the banks of a river-fed pond, skipping stones and teasing cousins, scantily clad and full of sugared ice of varying states of matter. I drift to the sound of a gentle but full rain and the smell of coppery earth, and of onions, peppers and hot lard in the kitchen, menthol smoke and of Summer being birthed.

A scant few hours later and I awaken to the sound of laughter, from the grown ups at the picnic table in front of the barrel grill where a porcine sacrifice, dark and golden brown visible even in this early part of the evening, still sizzles and makes the air pungent as our appetites.

The roosters call out and awaken me just as the sun is taking its chance. I see the cousins scattered on blankets about the porch and have the vaguest memories of last nights firefly hunt that rendered us useless as the bugs lay dormant and dying in the jars that were the erstwhile bearers of ice cold sweet tea that energized all the cousins until the night and dimming embers on the fire pit leaves us in a pile upon the porch conjecturing which television hero we’d rather be, B. A. Baracas, Bo or Luke Duke, or the Greatest American Hero? My older cousin, Darius, leads us in a round of the theme song from his favorite. “Believe or not, I’m walking on air…" There are six of us cousins and each of us join in at some point ion the song.

"Whoooo can it’ beee? Believe it or not it’s jus’ meee… “ Darius finishes the lines with a voice that signals the last summer of falsetto that would shame a castrato. We giggle until the witching hour and sleep overtakes us.

The next morning I awaken in the pile of cousins all asleep on the porch as my Nanny shuffles onto the porch with a basket of tomatoes, red, yellow, green and purple, no doubt just plucked from the garden as I can smell the rich fragrance from where I lay.

"Good morning, Nanny. "

"Morning chocolate chip," she whispers and smiles and extends a hand that I eagerly take. "Want to help me wash these apples."

"Those aren’t apples Nanny."

"Well ain’t you smart. Want to help me wash ‘em’ and get ‘em ready for breakfast? "

"Yes mam."

I do the best job of washing tomatoes, Nanny slices one into quarters and grabs a pinch of salt and throws it onto the pieces. She hands me the bright red fruit from withered hands the color of caramel. I take it and chew it in a bite and the world grows brighter from the taste as a trickle of its’ juice escapes to my chin and tank top. Uncle Bilbo crawls into the kitchen and hoists himself into a chair at the table and looks on.

The yellow and green tomatoes she slices thickly and lays aside while the lard melts and spreads across the cast iron.

“Hand me the HillBilly Green ones now…”

“What’s a billbilly, Nanny?

“A kind of tomato… or man."

“That’s green?”

“Most tomatoes start green, those hillbillies can be any color. They good for frying when they're green cause they have so much tastes and meat.

“Meat?”

“That’s what they call the inside my little pickadee.”

“Nanny, what’s a pickadee?

“It’s a little bird that's pretty and has a lot to say. Now hand me that sack of flour.”

At least fifteen or more bodies move through the open kitchen in the forty minutes it takes her to cook for 25 or more given the time of day and occasion.

Even with her wingman, Uncle Bilbo her youngest brother, coming through to fry some chicken and fish, and make coleslaw, she gets the credit and admiration as the doorways fill with faces and bodies watching on, licking their own chops at the quiet mastery of the appetite and senses. “This lady knows how to draw audience,” Uncle Bilbo says and even though his contribution doesn’t hurt the aroma or building appetites'.

Then it’s time for plating. Nanny hands me the cat ear biscuit, barely rim pink from the beefsteak juice glistening at her cinnamon-skinned fingers, gnarled to young eyes yet still inviting, a deceptively muscular and veiny hand attached to the thinnest of wrist and arms so small as to be fragile. The bread and tomato is still warm as the feel of the morning. The salt and pepper are the spice of the morning but the first tomato, fresh and sweet, is the start of a love affair with the fruit of the vine.

2002 The Pie

The house is much more elaborate than I remember and there are several new additions including a second floor. The rooms have doubled, but still small. Every surface is covered with pictures, knick knacks and bric a brac. The smell is undeniably my Nanny’s house, but she is not there.

I walk out and sit on the porch next to Uncle Bilbo, Nanny’s youngest brother, while his wife, Aunt Caroline, picks and oils his hair.

“Don’t mess it up for’ the service,” Auntie intones to my great Uncle as he sits in silence. Aunt Caroline walks away and as she enters the kitchen, the screen door slams behind her and for a moment the leitmotif sustained by the katydids cease their dance and a hush descends in time to hear a woodpecker solo, and the opening salvos of the newly emerged locust.

“You need anything Uncle Bilbo?”

“Naw’ son, I’m fair to middlin’,” he answers.

*********************

The ceremony for Nanny is reserved and understated by Mississippi standards. All the crowns are on full display and everyone wears a suit, even the rambunctious Mississippi cousins I barely remember, Darius and Lashawn.

Uncle Bilbo rolls up in his wheelchair to the side lines of the second row of pews in the church. In the center where the communion table used to sit, Nanny’s casket takes pride of place.

We return to the farm where Nanny will be buried in the self-same earth from which I saw her take bites when I was literally knee high. We return for the burial and repast. The family and the community of the town gather for story and song, for remembrance of summers past.

Around the table in the kitchen and dining room, there is food enough for an army. Fitting for a woman who has fed everyone who crossed her path and her door. All the good stuff is there, collards and turnips of course two variations of each. Corn bread and muffins and pones that Ms. Lula brought stuffed with peppers and clams on account she was from down south of the bayou as they say in Mississippi. There are three hams, the one from the Kiwanis still in its gold wrapping from Honey Baked. There is Aunt Alberta’s fried chicken, the best of the three fried chicken offerings saluting Nanny. There’s the potato salad and sweet cucumbers and tomato salad.

Over on the sweets table, in the middle near a mean German chocolate cake and a sweet potato pie, there is a buttermilk pie and a tomato pie, the maker I couldn’t say. I make a fatuous display at cutting the tomato pie while the room is distracted by the appearance of Uncle Bilbo greeted as the last of the generation to which Nanny belonged. I escape with the pie to the cellar and enter the dark and cool mausoleum of fruit and vine. I walk past the carefully canned pears and wine, berry jams of varying shade, and even pickled eggs and okra.

I come to the wall of tomatoes in varying states in the clear mason jars and stop. I uncover the pie and begin to shovel the sweet, roasted ripe fruit of the summer, Nanny’s pride, as fast as I can eat it before hiccups and tears take hold. As I acknowledge the jarred, stewed, sauced and soup-ed variety stretching back the better part of five, I regain some semblance of composure and continue eating slowly, savoring each bite of the tomato pie.

2019

In the morning on the farm, my first in more than fifteen years, Lily, my daughter, awakens me with her small soft hands across my face in its entirety. Only she is allowed to do it, like her mother Fabienne, now my ex-wife, used to in her own less gentile and more French manner. She pulls me from my slumber and into the kitchen. We walk out onto the porch where it’s already muggy and hot and the repetitious and pitched thuds against tree bark greets us.

“Quest que cest… that sound, Papa?”

“It’s a woodpecker… my little pickadee…”

“Regardez, Papa, une picnic des coccinelles!” A swarm of ladybugs on the colonnade has stolen her hands and fancy as I sip from the first coffee of the morning.

“J’ai faim, Papa. Tu desires Shakshak?” I smile at her secret name for her favorite breakfast. She wants shakshuka for breakfast like we make together in Paris with her Maman.

“Nous sommes a Mississippi… We are in Mississippi, Nous devons manger comme si nous étions à.” I respond in my own childlike French. Auntie Caroline ambles on to the porch.

“Pourquoi, Papa. Je veux shakshak. Font-ils des œufs et des tomates?”

“Du le jardin cherie, ceci n'est pas les… les poivre… seulement tomate.”

“What y’all talking about all funny?” Auntie Caroline appears on the porch with her coffee from a chipped mug older than me.

“Hey Auntie…” I say to my aged widowed Aunt. To Lilly I say, “Elle a demandé ce que vous avez dit… en anglais.”

“I want tomato for le… breakfast,” my sweet girl demands.

“Her Mama makes this dish with tomato sauce and eggs that she loves. Cause she loves tomatoes.”

“Awww she wants some tomatoes, you know we got a heap of them here. Matter of fact I got a taste for a tomato pie. It used to be your favorite when you was her age.”

“I still love it, I wish I knew Nanny’s recipe.”

“I know it. I’ll make you one if you ain’t careful.”

“I’d love it, Auntie. I want some fried tomatoes too.”

“You ain’t said nothing but a word, nephew.

“Tu voudrais une galette de tomate pour le petit déjeuner?

“Mais oui, Papa… I never had tomatoes this way.”

“Well…”

“Well why didn’t you say so?”

“She doesn’t like to speak English.”

“That’s okay.” Auntie holds out her arm and extends her brittle and chipped beige nails to Lily who takes her hand with a smile.

In a few minutes, Aunt Caroline is in the kitchen with Lilly on a barstool at her side. She dices a tomato and with her cocoa fingers offers a cube to my baby girl.

“Merci, Auntie,” she says and takes the rich red fruit in her hand and into her mouth and lets the juice dribble and hang on her chin.

“Mmmm, tomate, papa,” Lilly smiles as Aunt Caroline looks at her quizzically and then smiles. She kisses the top of her head.

“That tastes like summer,” I remind her and know she won’t forget.